Words were dead to me. Gone with times that once were, repressed by the day to day, nine-to-five. I’d forgotten what it was like to love a sentence, love a word, a pattern. Then her voice read. Voices so mundane had read those words for years, and now they were revived, remembered, given life again, so once more they could inspire the belief.
I’d started to thing they were useless, that beauty was impractical, that sentences were no longer mansions but terraces houses, conveniently packaged to be just enough, but nothing more. People no longer build gothic cathedrals, or exquisite palaces, we build semi-detached houses that are environmentally sound and economical to run.
I don’t know when it was that I lost that feel; the way words use to move me. Somewhere in this lacklustre mundane world of temporary survival I was reduced to another yielding cog in the forever machine But now I am alive again, heaven sang and an angel’s power found my pen and made me see beauty again; see it as aesthetics, instead of just debts and loans.
Buildings fall down, cars stop working, but words last forever, lasting on page after page, read and recited by different minds right down the ages. That moment as we read Pope, or Chaucer or Marlowe, how are minds engage with the will of the words, the syllables come to life as we struggle to understand old words written centuries ago, or as we suffer the translator’s wraith when he replaces them with new ones. But it does not matter, because words are alive and they are still changing the world forever. We would not know what Jesus looked like laying on the cross is someone had not penned it, nor would we know the atrocities of countless wars, had someone not had the bravery to write what they saw down.
We needs words to make things real, and they are real, here on this page. The day I become no longer impressed by everyday speech is the day I give up. How we go through that infinite effort, bending and flexing our tongues round the moving breath, just to pronounce the most basic sounds, and say “the”. I cannot respect man for buildings, for birds have beautiful nests, I cannot respect man for the car, for birds can fly, cheetahs run and fish swim. But humans can talk, and write. Write thoughts and feelings and ideas, express what we want, what we need or feel without having to resort to basic instinctive cries.
I thank her for reminding that, as her tongue bends the of centuries ago, bringing them back to life again. Marlowe is dead, his skin decayed, his soul ambiguous, his bones anonymous, but right now he is alive. In this room, in the air, he is here, infecting me; my ears tingling and vibrating to his thoughts centuries later. Right now, this is time travel.
I did not believe in muses, I didn’t think Shakespeare had to stare at a pretty face just to make things rhyme. But right now it’s different. Right now I am not writing because I wish, but because she made me. Made me believe, made me hope and dream and think. She did that, and all with just words.
I will not call her a muse, not debase her to an idea, or an inspiration. She is not mechanism, or a means to an end; she is the words, the language and the thoughts in my head. As each syllable passes through her lips once more I am reminded why beauty is more important than objectivity, why it doesn’t matter that the sky is blue, just that blue is more beautiful than black.
Science is important, but its father, Da Vinci was an artist, a man who saw the world through twisted eyes and made it change. I believe in art, is music, on words. I do not care if the artist has depth or if the writer can spell, as long as it feels. As long as that creation inspires some light or hope in the darkness of humanity then it is worth it. The human race has hurt itself, it has hurt its planet, humans cheat, they steal, lie and steal, but at least they invented words.
Words are not everything, I cannot like God declare light and let it be, but I can write and idea. I can like Orwell write a story of some pigs on a farm who corrupt the ideals in which they originally so firmly believed.
Many people don’t have this faith in words, they will tell you that the mechanic or the doctor are more important then why do gears break down? Why do people die? Why does metal rust, diseases mutate, but words last forever?
It is with an idea that I write. People should not write for fortune or just to make a quick bit of cash to keep the account looking happy. Instead they should seek to inspire, to make people read and write themselves. it does not matter who has been published and who has not; nor does it matter who has the best use of syntactic patterning or extended metaphors. All that matters is that it is written; that the brain releases that hope in humanity and the ideas trickle down through the arm and out into the world: Ideas that can make people smile, cry, or even change the world.
So I thank the voice in the night time air. Her soft voice forever speaking the words as though plunging me into the world in which they were written. All of a sudden the human race is not lost but saved, and now may the world keep turning, people keep thinking, and minds keep writing, and may we all thank that voice in the night time.